Shaolin Kung Fu week 7

I'm now training 2 to 3 days a week. Although I CAN train every day if I wanted to, I like to have days off to recover and heal .

Tuesday session I wasn't feeling great to start with. I didn't have enough food for the day so I broke my clean eating diet and got some spring rolls from the local take away. Wasn't much to them but they completely zapped my energy. Gave me stomach and digestion issues and just felt all round bad. Not a great start for training. I also wasn't feeling emotionally well at the time, not sure if the food triggered this as well or just contributed to bringing these issues to the surface.
Ive been studying CST much more and now at the Prasara Yoga phase. I didnt understand this much back when I was studying before but made much more sense now.  Learning about emotional attachment to physical tension and starting to try and understand the source of the tension within my own body. Mainly hip and sacrum area which I've had for years and contributed to my injuries from 7 years ago. More on this in another post as it requires a LOT of explanation and I'm only just brushing the surface at the moment.

But because of this I decided to try and release some of the tension before the training session. Already feeling bad, I completely forgot the advice . "only focus on yoga tension release practise at the end of the day as you will be mentally and physically exhausted from it, and pretty much useless for anything else. ."
Whoops. I could hardly get through the training session. Even duck walking was difficult as I couldn't even keep balance and kept falling over.
I felt pretty bad about this and it wasn't until I got home I reflected on what had happened during the entire day and worked on a plan to improve where I had failed.

Basically.
- Don't do Yoga before a training session.
- Don't eat low quality food, its not worth it.

Wednesday, after a good passive recovery sleep, I felt a lot better about everything. Spent an hour in the evening working on more of the hip release yoga and after, I felt mentally amazing and had opened up my range of motion almost twice what it was before hand. Quite incredible really. Then more sleep.

Thursday session, I was much more prepared. Eating good food, well timed throughout the day and energy was through the roof. I also felt much better mentally as I'd worked through a lot of the the source of tension in the hips. It was a very good training session over all, and was given new forms to practise.
Felt great the whole drive home.. Massive improvement from Tuesdays session due to the work I had done Wednesday night. I really need to delve deeper into Prasara yoga . And I will.

Saturday was a Tumbling and acrobatics class. Back when I had the injuries I had just started to train in Gymnastics , but this was only very brief due to divorce and other circumstances. This is another reason I wanted to start fresh with Shaolin Kung Fu as it has all the benefits of an efficient martial art with all the acro elements of gymnastics.
I did make the mistake of thinking this would be easier than the straight Kung Fu classes as its all ages so we have ages 4 and up. However this was the most intense session so far. So many plyometric jumping drills and core exercises. I did manage to learn how to do a nice handstand that I was incapable of before the class. Main thing I need to focus on from this is the cartwheel . Easy as kids but much more difficult as an adult.
I was curling up into a ball rather than outstretched legs and landing on my arse.  This is another issue relating to the hip / sacrum tension.
All in all it was a great week of training, and looking forward to another week ..

The training week now looks like this
All at the same place. Shaolin Kung Fu Guan in Brisbane's south side.

Tuesday - Kung Fu 5:30-6:30 .
                and about to start Wushu 7:45 - 8:45
Wednesday -  4:30am Active Recovery .
Thursday - Kung Fu 5:40 - 6:30
Friday - Active Recovery
Saturday - Tumbling and Acrobatics 10:00 - 11:00am
Sunday - Active recovery
Monday - Active Recovery

By active Recovery I mean an Intuflow CST session just after I wake in the morning.
This makes a massive difference to how fast I heal and recover from intense training sessions.
I now also practise Prasara Yoga last thing at night to release emotional tension mainly in my hip / sacrum as its been a problem most of my life.

Will be interesting to see how this pans out over the coming weeks.

Weigh in week 7

Little more progress this week. Ive started training more, so no real progress on the horse stance as I'm still sore and recovering from last training session. I should see an improvement on this in the coming week once my body has dealt with it. Still no running as Its not necessary with all the extra Shaolin training. Exhale time was much less for some reason. not sure.

I'm probably going to stop measuring the run distance and exhale time as i don't really need to monitor this.

Diet has improved. No alcohol for 2 weeks now and don't really feel like it any more.

I'm pretty busy so Ive been pre preparing everything and taking meals with me to work places and in the car as I drive around 1000km a week or more.

My basic day looks like this

4:30am Wake and out of bed. Glass of clean water with fresh lemon juice. Intuflow Active recovery session
5:00am I'm usually in a rush so miss first breakfast. pack my food for the day, Make a large cup of Yerba Mate tea for the drive.
5:30am drive down town (1.5 to 2 hours.)
7:30am Eat breakfast . Fresh clean meat and veg. then start work
8:00am Cup of Liver Detox Tea
10:00am Second breakfast. Fresh clean meat and veg.
10:30am more Mate tea.
12:30pm First lunch fresh clean meat and veg
3:00pm second lunch more meat and veg
4:00pm drive home or to training
6:00pm First dinner meat and veg
8:30pm water whole Protein, wheat grass, etc as a night cap shake. then bed.

training days are fairly different. as the timing has to be perfect for my digestion and energy to be at the right level due to maximum exertion.
also
3-4 litres of water throughout the day. all fresh filtered rain water from my place. I take this everywhere as its awesome.  
notice there's no bread / starchy carbs / no sugar /
just varying amounts of fresh clean meat and veg either red meat or white .
all cooked in either Coconut oil or Bacon grease depending on what I'm cooking.
Red meat gives me enormous amounts of energy and I actually feel like running 10k after a meal like this.
White meat not so much, so ill be swapping out the chicken etc in favour of more read meat.
I have an iron deficiency so this is one reason I do so well.

Disclaimer. : DO NOT copy my diet.
one mans food is another mans poison.
I've spent years learning how my body operates with close monitoring from a doctor with blood tests.
This kind of diet give me personally immense energy and i feel amazing all day long free of insulin crashes. 

If you want to start this journey I recommend reading the facts in Scott Sonnons FREE 28 days primal eating guide .

Veggie House Stage 1

I mentioned a few weeks back we had started to grow our own food, so now its time to get stuck in and build a large scale vegetable garden.

 First we had to break up and remove all the old concrete slab. This took all day Saturday.

 We decided to recycle the concrete as a retaining wall and stepping stones rather than removing it all from site.

 Sunday, Rosanna spent building steps to the letter box and building tiers. She also turned over all the soil and removed the thousands of rocks. I built the frame work from a pile of bamboo we had stashed along the side of the house for years. I drilled holes in the bamboo and used fencing wire to tie them all together. In the end formed a very sturdy structure.


Then we added the anti bird netting . We live in a forest and the animals will eat everything if we didnt do this. Plus the chooks would dig it all up as they do. We still need some more netting other than that its ready to turn over the soil with some horse poo and get planting.
Overall this cost less than 20 bucks and a weekend of work. And Suki keeps calling it a veggie House. ha ha. So now thats its official name.